Spot The Crane
For those readers fortunate to have read my alternate blog, you may have figured out that we don't live in Seattle proper. We're actually located in the city of Bellevue, which is located just a few minutes away across Lake Washington. We are connected to Seattle by floating bridges, which are essentially giant pontoons made of concrete linked together. The bridges are generally reliable as only two have sunk since I've lived on the west side of the state. Fortunately I have no vehicles at the bottom of Lake Washington. The lake is quite deep and very cold. Every now and then they pull out a well preserved aircraft build by Boeing during the WWII era. Apparently, not all of them passed flight testing.
Bellevue was previously thought of as another Seattle suburb, but has emerged as a city in it's own right and is now number four in population in the state. Bellevue has a reputation as being THE UPSCALE city of Washington State. For those of you familiar with Bob River's Twisted Tunes, "Highway to Bellevue", based on an AC/DC song, is all about the city's alleged reputation.
Bellevue is a diverse city with twenty-five percent of all residents being foreign born. Within a three mile radius of our house we have three Indian, two Mexican, one Russian, one Japanese and one Korean grocery stores. Ethnic restaurants abound, so the dining choices are very good. The downtown area is clean with lots of shopping and good restaurants. The local pool hall has a dress code and goons at the door to keep out the riff-raff, but somehow we still manage to get in (I think the cute blonde wife helps). Even the punk kids smoking cigarettes on the street corners are tastefully dressed.
The city is experiencing an unbelieveable building boom. One of our favorite games is to play "spot the cranes" Check the pictures below and see how many building cranes you can spot.
Recently one of the cranes toppled and fatally smashed a lawyer sitting in his easy chair in his downtown Bellevue condo. A tragic incident of course, but still...
posted by Alan @ 3/10/2007 07:52:00 PM
8 Common Taters
8 Comments:
... a good start?
I seem to recall it taking a lot longer than "a few minutes" to get from Seattle to Bellevue, but maybe that was just rush hour.
...it's a lawyer! ba da bum! (btw, is this a true story?) and those floating bridges being "generally reliable" -- now, THAT would make me feel safe!
so, do you bellevue-ians get annoyed when someone refers to your city as "seattle"? someone who should know better? [;-) to bryan for referring to our city as "sacramento" (to ME), even having been here many times. he now says it's the city that is NOT sacramento...]
Dave - Rush hour does get backed up pretty bad. Even so, it's typically a 20 minute drive from our house to the downtown area of Seattle.
Si - Yes the crane accident was a true story. If the guy had gotten up out of his recliner thirty seconds earlier to get a beer, he would have been fine. There's a lesson here somewhere. On a side note, the crane operator rode it down to the ground and walked away. And yes, the locals hate it when Bellevue is referred to as a "Seattle suburb". We are a city in our own right. "We're number four, we're number four...!"
well, my link to bryan didn't quite work -- it looks good, tho, eh? :) and bryan didn't refer to us as a suburb-of but was saying "staying in sacramento". this confused me -- why was he staying in sacramento when he was working here (he wasn't, btw)?? his reasoning was that anyone outside of the area would of course consider us one in the same. that comment went over very well -- he had only been coming to work here about once a month for a year at the time! now, we're not letting him work here at all -- even tho he's begged and begged... :-)
I couldn't help wondering why the Boeing planes were crossing the floating bridges in the first place. Flight testing indeed!
Hi Allison, welcome to the blog. Always glad to hear from new readers.
Boeing performs initial ground testing by taxiing the planes back and forth across the bridges. When ground testing is completed, flight tests then begin. It's quite a sight to see the planes on the bridge.
what a strange way to go.... sounds like he cheated death a few too many times and it caught up w/ him.
Hi, Allison! Fancy meeting you here! :)
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